One of my colleagues, a teacher from Nevada, tells me that the lake is a great place to dump a body if you don’t want it to surface again. This is because the water of the lake is so cold that bodies don’t decompose easily, and because they don’t decompose they don’t form the gases that float them to the surface. It’s believed, in fact, that dead bodies stay perfectly preserved in the depths of the lake. This from a 2004 SF Chronicle story:

This might sound crazy, but in the past 25 years, I’ve heard different versions of this story at least a dozen times. In one account, a fisherman snags up, gets it loose, and reels up a partial hand where two of the fingers had been lopped off Mafia-style. It is a tale passed around called “The Legend of Three-Fingered Tony.”